


The Bitterness of Love Is Twin of Its Hope

by Celeste Goodchild (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-02
Updated: 2008-08-02
Packaged: 2017-10-30 06:02:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/328544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Celeste%20Goodchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if the Master had decided to canvas his foe before Martha and the Tenth Doctor had made it to the end of time...?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bitterness of Love Is Twin of Its Hope

“Can I help you at all?”

The voice startled them both, but the Doctor answered first. He usually did, but even after all this time in his company Martha still wasn’t sure this was entirely for the best.

“Oh. …oh! No.” His characteristic smile, no longer uncertain, broadened; it was almost at cartoonish proportions as he added cheerily: “No, no, we’re quite all right. Bit of a thing, you know. We’re sorting it.”

The man – dressed rather snappily in what Martha suspected was probably some of the best Ede and Ravenscroft had to offer – followed the Doctor’s flailing hand as it indicated the door he’d been hunched over seconds before. “With a laser pointer, yeah?”

The Doctor blinked. If Martha hadn’t been worried about the new addition calling security, she knew she would have laughed out loud at his bemused expression. “It’s got…special settings. For…you know, the odd emergency.”

“Like when you’ve forgotten your keys?” the man asked, and though he seemed dubious there was the smallest hint of a smile to his mobile lips. “Locked them inside, maybe, left the gas on, bit worried about the bill?” He paused, leaning around them both like he could see clean through the thick wood. “…or the exploding?”

The Doctor’s grin was back to supernova status now. “Yes, exactly like that! I have a right shonky memory, just ask Martha here. Almost left her at Tower Hill once. …the Tube station, I mean. Not the actual Tower, course not. And I didn’t do it ‘round the time one lovely Ms. Boleyn was having a bit of trouble with her Harry, either. Certainly not! Right, Martha?” She couldn’t contain a snort at that, and bit back a rather choice reply as he added with the wounded grace of an overgrown puppy: “Aw, I _said_ I was sorry, didn’t I?”

Sometimes Martha wondered what the Doctor had been like as a child. She rather imagined if he’d been at all like he was now, he’d have gotten away with blue murder. As it was, all she could do was shake her head and grin.  “Yeah, you did,” she admitted, though she then crooked a swift thumb back towards the door. “But you know…the gas?”

For a moment the Doctor looked baffled, but then his brain caught up with his mouth and he brightened considerably. “Yeah!” he said, and then turned that same brilliant smile back to the well-dressed man. “Sorry, really got to do something about this. Gas bill’s already murder without actually levelling the tower block, so if you could just let us get back to it…”

When he blinked and crossed his arms over his chest, for the first time Martha felt uneasy. Oh, sure, he could call security. She’d been worried about that from the moment he’d spoken. But as he surveyed them both from what felt like a vantage point that couldn’t possibly be real because he stood at the same level as them both, she felt…off, somehow. Like there was something she was missing in a face that seemed somehow familiar, in a voice that held a cadence she half-recognised…

“I could let you do that,” he said, tilting his head thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose I might let you do that, but...”

“…but?” Martha couldn’t help asking.

“I could help you instead.”

Martha rather suspected he could have knocked the Doctor over with a feather. “Oh, no!” he said, and one hand raked his hair into a close approximation of a spun-dry porcupine. “Really, it’s fine. Me and Martha here, we’re a bit of a team. Don’t want to break up the dynamic. And I’ve got my wee screwdriver here, we’ll be right as rain in no time. And lookit you, with your nice creased suit and your shiny shoes and that _great_ Wile E. Coyote tie! You must have some important job in the City, and we wouldn’t want to keep you. Go on back to it, don’t worry about us; we’ll have the gas off in a jiffy.”

“But I’m really sure I could help.” Martha involuntarily took a step sideways as the man glided closer, bent slightly to take a good look at the handle the Doctor had already been messing with for the better part of five minutes. “I’m good with locks.”

“Oh, I’m not so bad myself, really.”

The smile the man gave the Doctor surprised Martha; there was something about it she couldn’t quite place. It was friendly, yes. Familiar, even. But there was a sense of challenge to it that wasn’t entirely explained even by his next words. “I could get that open faster than you could, I’m sure,” he said gamely. “We could even make a bet.”

Martha winced even before he replied; if there was one thing she’d learned from travelling with the Doctor, it was that he could no more resist a bet than one of those mad blokes off _Top Gear_. “Well, all right then. Just don’t worry about the dosh, and go right ahead – be my guest!”

The man’s approach to the door was far more understated than the Doctor’s extravagant gesture. Dropping to one knee, he gave it a cursory examination and then stood tall again. The familiarity of that voice, the tilt of the head, had Martha stifling a gasp of sudden recognition; his full attention, however, was on the Doctor alone. “This’ll be the proverbial piece of chocolate cake, I do believe.”

The Doctor was rather nonplussed as he watched the man take out his wallet. “Aw, that old credit card trick? I could do that!”

“I’m sure you could,” he replied smoothly, and Martha bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from blurting out the question that now burned the tip of her tongue. “But this is a lot quicker. Bit more old school, though."

The Doctor peered at the man’s hand dubiously. “What, bobby pins?”

“Even older school.” And with a gesture as grand as any she’d seen the Doctor commit himself to, he took a tidy bundle keys from his coat pocket and unlocked the door.

“…oh,” said the Doctor, as deflated as a helium balloon three weeks post-party.

The man’s grin, however, was white and wide. “Bit faster than your little laser screwdriver thingeemebob, yes?” he said kindly, and pressed against the door with the toe of one highly polished shoe. “…would you like to come inside, Mr…?”

“…Doctor,” he corrected, almost absently; Martha stopped staring at the other man long enough to see a certain amount of uneasiness had slipped into the Doctor’s dark eyes as he followed the door’s slow trajectory. “Um…”

He smiled again, and with its full force turned on them both Martha realised abruptly that he was _exactly_ who she thought it was. “Oh, it’s quite all right, Mr. Doctor. I’m sure it’s nothing that a nice warm cup of tea couldn’t sort out.”

The Doctor winced. “Yeah, but I really would duck if I were you.”

“What do you… _oh_.”

And that was when the giant mutant squirrel they’d already chased three and a half times around St. James Park lunged for the man Martha was now quite sure was going to be the next Prime Minister of Great Britain.

 

*****

 

“That was _fantastic_!”

The eyebrow Harold Saxon raised in the Doctor’s general direction – combined with the state of his suit and hair, generously covered as both were in something that resembled nothing so much as liquefied marshmallow – was far more sceptical. “I don’t think I’d call a giant squirrel climbing the Gherkin before flying off and then exploding all over the West End _fantastic_ , exactly.”

The Doctor, noticeably free of all gloop, looked sheepishly off to one side and across the Thames. “Well, it was better than _Starlight Express_ , surely.”

“I don’t know,” he said with a snort, trying to wipe the worst of the mess from his tie with a monogrammed handkerchief; he gave it up within two seconds as a lost cause. “But then again, the whole thing might have been more entertaining if we’d done it all on rollerskates.”

“You think?"

Martha, still wringing out her hair after her own foray into biomechanical engineering gone quite horribly _Twilight Zone_ , shuddered. “Don’t give him ideas!”

“Aw, Martha!” the Doctor promptly complained, but his eyes were dancing with all too familiar mischief as he turned them back to the Minister who’d been forced to take defence of his country to strange new territory today. Martha quite doubted intergalactically modified rodents had been in the job description, much in the way Space Rhinos hadn’t been in hers. “But seriously, Harry, you were. Fantastic, I mean.” With that said – and despite the questionable state of his attire – the Doctor leapt forward. Saxon danced back quite swiftly from the attempted embrace, and Martha had the distinct impression it wasn’t out of respect for the Doctor’s own miraculously untouched suit.

“…sorry,” he said, taking in the Doctor’s nonplussed look even as he tucked the ruined handkerchief back into his pocket. “I’m not a hug person.”

The Doctor frowned, but the expression was fleeting. “Oh. Right. Sorry!” Stuffing his hands into his ridiculous coat’s pockets, he swung merrily on his heels instead. “Didn’t mean to make things, you know, all awkward or anything.”

“Oh, not to worry,” he said, shucking off the jacket and draping it over the nearest park bench. The shirt beneath had managed to escape the worst of the fruits of ground zero, but given his hair still made him look like he’d gone prematurely grey it was only a small improvement. “We all have our little foibles, don’t we?”

“Like keeping mutant space squirrels in our apartments?” Martha remarked, already despairing of ever getting the sticky tacky goop off her leather jacket.

“I’ve already said, I haven’t a clue how that got in there,” Saxon protested, and began trying to scrape some of the worst of the dried mess from one shoe. “One of the downsides to being the Minister of Defence, perhaps? Unexplained giant squirrels taking refuge on your couch? Thought we had the Home Office for that sort of immigration malarkey.”

“There have been stranger downsides,” the Doctor remarked, and with a rather deliberate gesture leaned backwards so that he came to rest on the phone box at his back. “And stranger perks, at that.”

Saxon snorted, not looking up from the ruin of his dress shoes. “I don’t doubt it.”

“I have a stranger one than you’d ever have dreamed, I bet.” And Martha looked up from her own shoes sharply as she heard the Doctor drum his fingers across wood in a rhythm that seemed oddly familiar. “And this time, I’m sure it’s going to be a bet I’ll win!”

The promise of mischief in his voice was what made Saxon look up, Martha was sure. Certainly, it had her attention caught like a fly in a web. “How’s that?”

“Come with me.”

Martha felt like she’d been blind-sided by a rather large piece of falling masonry, and from the expression on Saxon’s face he wasn’t doing much better. “What?”

“Come with me and Martha.” And even as he draped an easy hand around her shoulder and pulled her into a close half-hug, Martha still found she didn’t have the words with which to speak. “Travel through space and time with us! It’ll be an adventure, yeah?”

“I don’t think so, Doctor. I have a campaign to finish, not to mention four days worth of paperwork just to explain all _this_. And it’s election day in less than a week.” His eyes flicked sideways, and Martha felt like she had been caught by the lunge of a cobra as they focused on her. “I hope you’re registered to vote, by the way.”

She was shocked by how conversational she managed to be despite the fact her heart was lodged firmly in her throat; she had the uneasy feeling she was really getting far too good at this sort of thing. “Well, as long as _he_ gets me back in time,” she said with a jab back towards the Doctor that might have been just a tad too hard, “I’ll be down there with my best voting pen in hand.”

“Aw, but really!” the Doctor protested, and although he still had his arm firmly about her Martha wasn’t at all sure he was still aware of her presence. “You heard, right? Space _and_ time! I promise I’ll bring you right back here! Right back _now_ , too!”

“Squirrel intestines and all?”

“…well, we can manoeuvre around those.” He nudged a particularly unidentifiable bit with the toe of one sneaker, and frowned. “I think.”

Saxon was already reaching for his jacket, looking across the river to the prickly spires of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. “Fascinating as it sounds, I don’t think—”

The Doctor’s interruption was oddly aggressive. “Don’t _think_. Just come.” He dropped his arm from Martha’s goopy shoulders, stepped forward. Martha could see he wanted to reach out and grab Harold Saxon’s hands and possibly pump them like pistons, but he stowed them safely in his pockets again instead. “We’ll be like the three musketeers! You can be Athos, Martha’ll be Aramis, and I’ll be D’Artagnan!”

Martha snorted. She just couldn’t help it. “Actually, he wasn’t a musketeer.”

“Aw, really?” The Doctor looked crestfallen. “Who was the other one then? Porthos? I don’t want to be Porthos! D’Artagnan sounds so much more dashing, don’t you think?”

Harold Saxon was already smiling, nodding, and backing quite distinctly away. “It was lovely meeting you.”

The Doctor whipped around immediately. “No, but really. Come with us. Just…one trip. Anywhere you want.”

Martha, although having once or twice been under that same scrutiny, was as unprepared for the intensity of the Doctor’s gaze as the Minister himself.  “Look, kind as it is of you to offer, I really don’t know about this.”

Martha expected more ranting about musketeers and squirrels and great grand adventures in the style of The Famous Five (Minus Two); she had no idea what Saxon had braced himself for. From the expression on his face, he was as surprised as she was by the quiet singularity of the Doctor’s request. “Please?”

“I don’t deny it sounds absolutely fascinating,” the man replied. Martha could hear apology in his tone, but there was a slant to his gaze that twisted something low in her abdomen. “And as much as the thought of ditching the paperwork here and now sounds downright marvellous, I’d also have to tell the wife first.”

“Wife?” This time it was the Doctor’s turn to look completely pole-axed, although Martha hadn’t a clue why. Perhaps it wasn’t a common problem among the people he picked up as passengers on the good ship TARDIS. She wondered what that said about her. “You’re _married_?”

“Yes.” Almost as if commanded to, the fingers of his right hand moved to twist the ring on the left; Martha’s attention, however, was far more attracted by the broad signet ring she noticed on the other. “Surely you understand – can’t just run off to see the universe without the little woman in tow.”

“I did.”

Her jaw dropped several inches as she stared at him. Saxon’s own look was far more circumspect, but there’d been a flash of… _something_ …there she couldn’t quite catch. She’d been far too tied up in her own shock at the Doctor’s unintentional confession.

“Well, I’m sure you’re not standing for elected office,” Saxon said finally, quite evenly. The Doctor flushed.

“Not then I wasn’t, no,” he said, and coughed quite suddenly. “Though it didn’t harm my chances any, later. Even though I sort of wished it had.”

This time his eyebrows shot clean through his hairline completely. “You’re a madman,” he said, and Martha wasn’t entirely convinced it wasn’t said without a large degree of admiration.

“Yeah, well.” His fingers raked once more back through his hair, and not for the first time this afternoon Martha envied him the fact he likely wouldn’t be washing squirrel entrails of it for the next three hours. “A madman who hates paperwork. You’re coming, right?”

His laugh was bright, even against grey London skies. “With an invitation like that, how could I resist?” And as Martha Jones watched, the Doctor held the door open so that Harold Saxon could step into the TARDIS.

 

*****

 

Though she was quite wrapped up in wondering how long it would be before she could slip off to have a shower and get some clean clothes, even Martha noticed the way the lights dimmed for a full five seconds as they crossed the threshold.

Saxon looked up as they came back to full power, and frowned at the impossibly high ceiling. “Forgot to pay your power bill this month, then?”

“Not that I remember,” the Doctor said with a frown of his own, bounding over to the console. Martha could only hope that meant he was distracted enough not to be pleased by the fact Saxon’s first on-board observation hadn’t been along the lines of her own _hey, bigger on the inside!_ remark. She hadn’t any real idea why he’d been so dismissive of it in the first place, but the memory still stung.

“That sounds promising.”

“She doesn’t usually do that, no.” The Doctor seemed undisturbed by Saxon’s dry answer, although he was clearly distressed by what Martha would have thought was just a small blip for the creaky old ship. In fact, by now he was pressing his ear to a particularly odd looking bit of gadgetry, one hand firmly clasping what looked rather like a plunger mated with a sledgehammer. “What’s wrong, old girl?”

Wrapping her hands about her upper arms – she regretted it almost immediately, considering the amount of sticky white pseudo-meringue she found there – Martha cast a look sideways at what she supposed was her new shipmate. “Pretty weird, right?” she asked brightly, and fought to keep the expression even as Saxon gave her a decidedly odd look. “It’s bigger on the inside.”

“Kind of like the terrace housing I grew up in, actually,” he replied with an easy shrug. “Don’t think this place has a coal chute complete with a family of territorial badgers, mind.”

“Badgers in the coal chute?” The Doctor righted himself with all the grace of a weighted child’s toy, and frowned. Martha noted he’d slipped on his glasses at some point, and he was adjusting them thoughtfully as he looked towards what she sincerely hoped was _not_ a coal chute populated with extraterrestrial wildlife. “Never looked. For badgers, I mean. Could be a bit of a lark, actually…we could get a dachshund in, and everything!”

“Looking for badgers with sausage dogs in your dimensionally transcendent spaceship as after dinner entertainment?” Abandoning his ruined suit jacket over one support strut, Saxon moved away from Martha’s side and crossed the gratings to where the Doctor stood near the helm of his ship. “You do have a most unusual idea of hospitality towards new guests.”

“Well, we could play Scrabble,” he amended quickly, slipping off his glasses and returning them to one of the pockets Martha was yet to find a scientific explanation for the capacity of. “Or Monopoly! I love Monopoly! …of course it’s Arcadian Monopoly, which means the money’s made of psychic paper and you don’t have hotels you have upside down gravity bubbles and when you go directly to jail the whole board gives you this massive electric shock, but…we could work around that.”

Martha ditched her own jacket, already wondering if even the TARDIS’s rather exceptional skills in laundry could salvage it. “I think I’m voting for the badgers.”

“I’m more a Scotland Yard person.” The blank looks this earned him from both Martha and the Doctor left Saxon looking rather put out. “…you’ve never played Scotland Yard? Deprived, the pair of you. …but what _is_ for tea?”

The Doctor shrugged off his own coat, tossing it on the captain’s chair with a rather shocking display of poor aim. Considering Martha had once seen him punt a cricket ball through a window the other side of the Mersey, she thought he was just being lazy. “…well, I’m not much of a cook, actually. Usually we just go down the shops for something.”

“Curry?”

An oddly hopeful look crossed the Doctor’s face, and Martha blinked at it. He’d never looked the slightest like that whenever they’d gone foraging for something even Gordon Ramsey couldn’t swear his blessed head off at. “We could go to India.”

“Actually, there’s a curry place just round the corner. Great tikka, I swear. And if you spend twenty quid they’ll give you all the poppadums you can carry.”

The Doctor appeared rather dejected. “…but… _India_ , honestly!” And with a quick sideways look at Martha, he added with a rather apologetic grin: “…and yeah, I promise it’ll be India this time.”

Saxon raised an eyebrow in Martha’s direction, and she rolled her eyes. “He means the last time he promised me Thai we ended up… _what_ was that place?”

“Raxacoricofallapatorius.” And as he saw Martha promptly trying to sound it out for herself, he added sharply: “We’re been through this, I’m not saying it again.”

Trying to mask what felt rather like a stab of annoyance mingled with quite genuine hurt, Martha turned to Saxon with a shrug that was far less easy than it looked. “He’d be a terrible languages teacher. No patience at all for teaching the phonetics of the tricky ones.”

“He speaks English very well, though,” Saxon said thoughtfully, leaning back on the console with his arms crossed over his chest. “Sounds like he might have gone to the same school as my cousin, actually.”

“Doubt it. Never was much cop at getting to school on time, anyway.” Apparently deciding to bring some order to things – not that Martha thought there was much protocol to TARDIS orientation, if her own experience was anything to go by – the Doctor clapped his hands. The medical student in her flared to life, though, when he promptly winced at the sound.

“Are you all right, Doctor?”

“Oh, yeah.” One hand had risen to his temple, and he winced again as he briefly worked his long fingers against it. “Bit of a headache, is all. You know how it is. Long day fighting galactic polymorph-construct monsters…it would make anyone want to nip down Boots and get some Disprin or something.”

“Right.” In fact, Martha had never heard the Doctor complain of anything quite so mundane before, but she didn’t feel comfortable saying as much in front of Saxon. Choosing action instead, she said brightly: “Hang on, I’ll be back in a tic.”

He was still kneading his temple as she clattered down the stairs to the gantry and scooted out the door that led into the impossible depths of the Doctor’s ship. As she always did before making a turn, Martha said a quick prayer to whatever gods were listening that she’d be able to find her way back home.

Her room was exactly how she’d left it – somewhere between a hurricane and its eye. As she fumbled through her bag and came up with a small foil packet, she found herself wondering where Saxon might find himself bunking. Or even if the Doctor would bother with such niceties in the first place. _Just one trip_ , he’d said. Of course the man undoubtedly needed a shower after first contact with the erstwhile MallowSquirrel, but she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of unease at the thought.

Then she told herself to grow up. The Doctor wasn’t hers, after all; he’d already gone out of his way to indicate as much several times this week alone. Despite that, however, she couldn’t help but think he’d seemed far more amiable about the one trip offered to the minister than he’d been about hers.

Making a silent pact to stop trying to second guess the Doctor – he was an _alien_ , after all; funny how she always forgot that when trying to work out his signals with only _Cosmo_ ’s debatable advice columns for company – Martha straightened her back and returned to the console room. She was more than slightly baffled, however, to find the Doctor and Saxon leaning back against the controls with a paper bag sat between them.

“What have you got there?” she asked with slight suspicion. She thought it was fair enough, given what the Doctor had already found behind Door Number One today.

“Jelly babies!” The Doctor beamed even as he tossed one into his mouth, catching it with an odd kind of grace that couldn’t do anything but make her smile. “Harry’s got jelly babies! Ooh, I really love jelly babies…I ever tell you that? ‘cause I do. Love them, I mean. Harry’s got a whole bag of them right in his jacket, how’s that for fantastic?”

“…fantastic,” she echoed, slightly bemused as she climbed up to their level; as she did so, she took great care not to spill the glass of effervescent water she carried. “Never heard you mention them before.”

“Really?” he asked. He also added in an innocent blink, but Martha had spent enough time with him to figure the expression was almost always just for effect. “Never mind…delicious, though. I love the little yellow ones. Bite their heads right off.” To illustrate, he took an over-enthusiastic chomp at the little sweet in his hand. As he leaned back to admire his handiwork, however, his expression’s radiance dialled itself down more than a little. “Always feels a bit like murder, though.”

Saxon snorted. “It’s quick and it’s clean, Doctor. Taking them off at the head.” He took another jelly of his own, and shrugged. “Don’t think about it. They certainly don’t get the time to.”

“…well, but surely the ones in the bag see what’s coming.”

“No, no, they can’t see out of the top. Just like sheep to the slaughter. They never know what’s about to hit them.” The grin he then directed at the Doctor seemed rather at odds with the serious bent to his words. “A bit sad, perhaps. They don’t even have the time to make a stand before it’s all over."

The Doctor seemed uninterested in Saxon’s expression, however. He was far more caught up with staring at his decapitated jelly baby. “…oh, right.”

Deciding it was probably time to move along from the subject of afterlives for jelly babies – and wondering why she was starting to feel rather like the mother of small boys – Martha crossed to the Doctor’s side and carefully held out the glass. “Here, I got something for you.”

Setting the remains of the jelly baby aside with rather more care than was warranted, the Doctor fixed his grin on Martha and she felt something in her stomach flip-flop. “Oh, thanks, Martha!” he said cheerfully, and raised it to his lips. “What is it?”

“Disprin.” She’d meant to add _for your headache_ but Saxon’s hand shot out and smacked the entire thing right out of the Doctor’s grasp. The formerly beloved Thomas the Tank Engine glass skittered halfway across the console room before landing with a definite crinkle of broken glass.

The Doctor followed the path of its trajectory seconds too late, and then gave Saxon a decidedly peculiar look. “…er…you all right there, Harry?”

“Sorry.” The man looked himself rather surprised at his action, giving his entire arm a look that rather seemed to indicate he thought it belonged to an alien creature rather than his own body. “…Disprin’s rubbish, you know. I always take Panadol Rapid.”

Martha swallowed, but before she could do so she had to let out a breath she hadn’t even been aware of holding. “That’s a pretty passionate opinion.”

“I have shares, you know. In the company.” His right hand raised to his temple, began to rub in a manner eerily reminiscent of the Doctor’s earlier gesture. “Like to protect my investment.”

“Suppose it makes sense. Even if I did really love that glass.” With a mournful shrug, the Doctor turned an apologetic look to her. “Thanks anyway, Martha.”

“Yeah,” she said, and told herself sternly not to get giddy like a schoolgirl. It was just a broken glass of medicine he hadn’t even got to drink, after all. “Look, I might just head off, have a shower…actually, I’m pretty knackered. I might just go to bed.”

She was warmed even further by the tragic look that crossed the Doctor’s face. “But… _India_ , Martha!”

“I’m not all that hungry,” she said, and with a deep internal breath she leaned over to pat his left hand where it rested on the console. He was cool beneath her touch, but she’d snuck enough of them to realise that along with two hearts, his people apparently kept a lower basal temperature than humans as well. “I’ll see you in the morning, yeah?”

“All right,” he said with a pout, but she noticed he was reaching for the bag of jelly babies again. “Night, then.”

She flipped a wave at Saxon, who nodded in return, and then turned to go back to her room. It wasn’t until she closed her door that she realised neither of them had offered her a single jelly baby. Even when she tried to stall her brain out of thinking about it, ducking her head beneath the high pressure water, she couldn’t quite stop herself from wondering why.

 

*****

 

Though she’d regretted leaving almost immediately, it was still two hours by her watch before she worked up the nerve to go back to the console room _and_ got the most of the mess out of her hair. There was now just one figure there, but her heart both sank and was relieved to see it wasn’t who she had wanted it to be.

“…Mr. Saxon?” she asked cautiously, noting that while he was still dressed in a neat suit, it was now a deep grey rather than black. As a matter of fact, between that and the tidied state of his hair, he no longer appeared to be the end result of an explosion in a marshmallow factory.

“Ah.” Looking up from the console, up from something he held in his hands, let his hand slip down to the console. “The lovely Miss Tyler.”

“Jones.” She moved easily up the grated steps, even as she wondered where on earth he’d got that name from. She didn’t even know anyone by the name of Tyler. “Miss _Jones_. Actually, it’s Martha, but…”

He smiled at that, and she was struck again by the incongruity of it all. How many times had she seen that smile in the last few months, bright upon television screens and billboards? And now here they were, together in the dim light of an alien spaceship. His next words hardly made things any more real. “Then I’m Harry. I insist.”

“All right. _Harry_.” The name felt odd on her tongue, thick and not right. She supposed it was just the _this man is going to be the next prime minister, probably!_ thing slipping in again. “…I was passing, heard someone in here, wondered if it was the Doctor. Thought I’d just pop in and see what he was doing.”

“So he’s a bit of a night owl, then?” Noting he was seated in what the Doctor tended to treat as the captain’s seat made her vaguely uneasy, but she tried hard to ignore it. The Doctor was more than slightly mad, she was sure of that, but he wasn’t an idiot. She had no idea why he’d warmed to the man so quickly, but then she supposed the same could be said for her.

“I don’t think I’ve really ever seen him sleep. I’m not even sure he needs to.” She leaned back against the console herself, faced the seated minister. “…well, there was this one time when we kind of shared a bed, but it wasn’t like that and there was Shakespeare involved and…you know how these things are.”

The smile he gave her was only half-formed, and rather wry. “Actually, no, but I’ll take your word for it.” His fingers tapped out an idle rhythm as his gaze shifted back to the lazy undulations upon a screen she’d never been able to read. “He’s an interesting creature.”

“Aliens,” she said with a shrug, with a laugh. The strange circles on that particular screen had always bothered her, even before the first time she’d seen the Doctor move and manipulate them as effortlessly as a conductor before his orchestra. “Pretty weird way to end an increasingly weird day, huh?”

“I must say, I didn’t expect them to have such snappy dress sense.”

That really did make her laugh, and for the first time she could feel herself relaxing in this man’s presence. It did make her wonder, however, if all politicians gave off the same aura of command. “You should see his wardrobe! Some truly horrifying stuff in there, believe you me. I almost strangled myself on this mutant scarf in there once…and the coat.” She shuddered at the technicolour nightmare memory. “Don’t even let me get started on that _coat_.”

This time the smile was broad, but still reserved for all that. It was like he was smiling at himself, but Martha could hardly see how he’d be capable of doing so. “I’ll take your word for that one, too.”

Given the nature of the coat, she thought he was probably better off not seeing it for himself. She might have said as much, if she hadn’t noted how intrigued he seemed by the circles; even as they watched, they shifted again into another geometric pattern as unintelligible as the last. “Oh, don’t bother with those. We can understand whatever language he’s speaking all right, because the TARDIS translates everything. Or so he said. That, however, she won’t do anything with. It’s all just gibberish to me.”

The minister’s hand moved forward, almost as if he couldn’t help it; one finger traced an arc, and he did not look at her at all. “It’s Gallifreyan.”

“…Gallifreyan?” The name felt sour upon her tongue, and the evenness of her question surprised her. Inside, she was as off-kilter as a ruptured faultline. “He told you about Gallifrey?”

“He mentioned it.” Harry looked up at her then, and the lighting was dim enough that both eyes were in complete shadow. “Actually, now that you mention it, he seemed kind of surprised that he did. Like he hadn’t quite meant to.”

Swallowing hard, she leaned against the console in a motion she hoped seemed casual. It was actually because she wasn’t sure her knees wanted to support her right now. “He doesn’t like to talk about it. At least, that’s how it’s always come across to me.”

“From what he said, I hardly blame him.” Another arc, another chord traced. “Can you imagine that? Your entire home planet, just…gone?”

The strange richness of those words sent a shiver down her spine. “I can’t, no.”

Harry smiled, as if the circles held a joke only he could read. “Maybe you should.”

Watching him turn his full attention back to the text she could not read, Martha realised how odd it truly was, that the Doctor had left the other man by himself in the control room. She could count on one hand the number of times she had been in here alone. Then, as he pushed back, her heart nearly stopped dead when she noticed what he held in his other hand.

“Where did you get that?”

“What? You mean this?” The glow of the central panel shimmered on the smooth metal of the TARDIS key, and he stared at it as if hypnotised. “Oh, he gave it to me. Said I might need it to get in and out if I wanted some fresh air, or something of the sort. Better than a cat flap, I suppose.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she said, with a forced geniality. Martha had to wonder what, exactly, the two had talked about in the two hours she’d been gone. Or had it been longer? It was a time machine, after all. She had no idea if more time could pass on the outside than the inside if they’d landed somewhere. India, maybe. “…so you think you might hang around for a few trips, then?”

He turned his attention to her, rolling his eyes sideways although his head remained tilted upwards, towards where the central column disappeared into the roof. “What makes you say that?”

“I…just wondered.”

He snorted, rolled his backward so he still stared upward. Martha wondered what was so interesting up there. “Perhaps I will,” he mused, and pushed himself out of the captain’s chair; he shed his suit jacket as he did so. She was almost glad to see it, except then he pressed both palms to the console, leaned close like an old friend. “He did say she’s a time machine, after all. Makes her a bit special.”

“She sure is.” Despite the fact his motions made her nervous – alien spaceship or no, they still seemed rather…dramatic…for even a politician – Martha couldn’t help but warm to any discussion of the TARDIS. “I’m still amazed by her. Every time I come in here, I just…can’t imagine that she’s real. But she is.”

His eyes flicked sharply to hers. “You can hear her, then?”

“Hear her?”

“The TARDIS.” The power of his gaze almost made her take a step back, but then he turned it back to the panel. “She’s alive, you know.”

“Did…did the Doctor tell you that?”

Harry straightened up, turned to face her with arms crossed over his chest. Dressed now only in shirtsleeves, any tie long since abandoned, he still looked like he was in charge. Like someone in control. “He didn’t need to. You mean you really can’t hear her?”

Martha swallowed hard, told herself it was just because of who he was. Harold Saxon, after all, could very well be Prime Minister next week. “I…should I be able to?”

For a long moment, he didn’t say anything – and then he shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, and he chuckled as he turned around, flicked at a lever without quite moving. “All a bit new to me, isn’t it?”

Martha, as a medical student, was becoming more attuned as the months went by to the little cues that people gave off that told her…well. He wasn’t lying, she didn’t think. But something in her seemed to say maybe he wasn’t quite telling the truth, either. “I suppose. …and seeing as the Doctor’s not up, I might just go back to bed then.”

“Good night, Miss Jones.”

He felt his eyes on her back as she clattered down the stairs to the lower gantry, and for not the first time she wondered if the Defence Minister of Great Britain was privy to any secrets the government might know about the good Doctor of Gallifrey.

 

*****

 

Sleep would not come, no matter how much she tossed and turned and finally attempted to wheedle her way into it. It had often been this way for her, back in medical school on the night before a particularly nasty exam; though she knew she would never fail, there had always been the bone-deep fear that tomorrow would bring with it the first time she did. There were no exams to be sat here, she knew, but she couldn’t push the too-familiar sensation aside all the time. With a sigh Martha rolled over, kicked the sheets back, and climbed out of bed. Wrapping a long cardigan she’d filched from the wardrobe over her light pyjamas, she figured a trip back to the control room wouldn’t go astray. Perhaps the Doctor had returned; even though being around him wasn’t exactly relaxing, she had the feeling that at least it might be comforting.

As she approached, she heard clattering feet inside; her heart rose at the familiar jitterbug cadence, though it soon sank again. There were voices, too, and she realised that the Doctor had just found Saxon again.

“Harry! What are you still doing in here?”

He didn’t sound the least bit upset, Martha noted, and Harry himself sounded relaxed. She could almost imagine his grin as he asked: “Must have had a bit too much excitement, I guess – I’m like a kid on Christmas Eve, can’t sleep for waiting for Santa. How about you?”

“Not a big sleeper, me.” And though she had not crept close enough to the door to see, she knew the Doctor would be pushing a hand back through his over-spiked hair. “Was just wanting to…check a few things, I guess.”

“You don’t mind me being in here?”

“Oh. Nah, it’s fine.” Silence for a bit then, and she moved closer; even as she asked herself why on Earth she was eavesdropping like a sneak, something she’d never been in her entire life – Martha was all for keeping it out in the open – she peered around the doorframe to see the Doctor taking a seat in his makeshift captain’s chair. “Bit odd for you, I suppose, all this.”

Harry moved to stand just in front of him, hands braced against the console as he leaned backward. “I do feel like I’m in the strangest dream,” he mused, and smiled at the Doctor; his returned grin blooming bright. “Out in the middle of space with the last of the Timelords. Lucy always said I had my head in the clouds, but this pretty much takes the cake _and_ all the pies on that front.”

“Lucy?” The Doctor furrowed his brows. “She’d…she’d be the wife, then?”

“Her indoors, yes.” Harry folded his arms over his chest, crossed one ankle over the next. “Lovely girl. Bit on the slow side, but she’s rather a looker. And sweet. She offered to make me tea the first time we met, never mind she hadn’t a clue where to start.”

“Oh?”

His quiet laugh wasn’t nearly as genteel as anything he’d offered before. “Wealthy family. She’s never done a thing for herself. Makes her a bit impressionable, the poor thing.”

“Ah.”

“It was rubbish. The tea, I mean. But she meant well.”

The Doctor kicked back slightly in his chair, raised his hands to cradle his head. She noticed he’d put his glasses back on, and stifled a laugh even as she wondered why he was trying to impress Harold Saxon. “Tell you what – never turn down a girl who makes you a cup of tea, no matter how rubbish it might be.”

“Oh, so that etiquette’s not solely British territory, then?”

“It invades other countries now and then,” he returned cheerfully, and then she saw him frown again. “Oh, I’m being a terrible host! Would you like a cup of tea?”

He was already on his feet and moving towards her door when Harry interrupted his progress. “Martian tea?”

“Aw, why does everyone think I’m from _Mars_?” he complained, and Martha decided not to take off as he wandered back to towards Harry with a plaintive expression. “It’s Ionean, by the way. The good stuff I have in the jar on the highest shelf.”

“I’ll remember that,” Harry said, and he hadn’t moved at all from his place in front of the main navigation screen. “And I know you’re not from Mars. You said.”

“Ah. Yeah, I guess I did.”

There was silence between them then, and Martha felt again a strange shame about listening in to a conversation that didn’t involve her, wasn’t even _about_ her. It was not something she’d ever have bothered doing before she’d met the Doctor, and she was pretty sure even her feelings for him didn’t justify starting now. Still, Harry’s next words stopped her from abandoning her post. She remembered how the Doctor had looked when he spoken of his home planet. She’d never felt so close to him as she had in that moment, and even though this was between Harry and the Doctor somehow she just couldn’t move.

There was that odd sensation again, like she was on the eve of an examination she might just fail, but then Harry spoke and she shoved it right back under the carpet it had momentarily displaced.

 “Gallifrey.” He twisted the name on his tongue, as if tasting it for unseen bitterness. “Sounds almost Irish. Reminds me, I’ve really got to read that report about the latest nonsense in Northern Ireland.”

“I hardly think they’d call it nonsense.”

Harry raised an eyebrow at the Doctor’s sharp words, and even from a distance Martha could sense that he was not entirely impressed by the Timelord’s tone. “Perhaps not,” he said coolly, but the oddity of the statement was brushed aside by the next question. “So, did I turn down your offer of tea then?”

“Oh, no. No, you just never said.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want to be rude.” The two remained motionless for a moment, and then Harry said politely, yet pointedly: “Tea would be nice.”

“Yeah. Yeah, right.”

The Doctor appeared to have wandered off into one of his _moods_ , and Harry tilted his head to one side like a curious beagle. “…no need to rush, not on my account. Doctor.”

The name made her frown, and Martha realised she wasn’t sure she’d actually heard him say it before. The sound was sensual, strangely so; he twisted his tongue around it even more than he had with the Doctor’s home planet, and the smile building on the familiar face seemed suddenly very alien. The Doctor, however, was looking only at the flickering symbols on his navigation screen. His fingers were deep into the hair at the base of his skull.

“Yeah, well, I just…Gallifrey. Talking about it, even only a little bit, makes me feel a bit off.”

“You don’t look too well.” Harry pushed off from the console, walked closer. “Perhaps you should have had some of Miss Jones’s aspirin after all.”

“Oh, no, that would’ve been daft.” That hurt, although she did have to admit she couldn’t detect any scorn in the Doctor’s words. More a kind of…careless dismissal. She wasn’t sure that wasn’t worse. “But yeah. Don’t usually have a lot of headaches, me. It’s just like there’s this…noise, in the back of my head. Kind of like falling asleep with the radio on, only when you wake up it’s all turned to static and you don’t know how long it’s been like that. Makes you feel a bit wobbly and _off_ all day, doesn’t it?”

Harry stopped. “How long have you had it for?”

The Doctor removed his glasses – brainy specs, he called the things; she’d always wondered how much he really needed them – and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Since the squirrel. They’re such cute little things, who could have ever imagined they’d be so evil?”

“Who could imagine?” he echoed, and reached forward to rest one hand upon the Doctor’s shoulder. “Perhaps you ought to lie down and rest a bit, Doctor.”

“It’s more comfortable here, actually. With the light of the TARDIS.”

Harry paused another long moment, and then flicked his eyes sideways. Her breath caught, certain he had seen her – but he seemed unconcerned as he pressed the Doctor back, pushed him down into the captain’s chair. “I’ll go, then. Let you have some quality time with your little girlfriend.”

Martha frowned at the last word – had he sounded almost bitter then? – but the Doctor hadn’t seemed to have caught that at all. “Oh, no. I owe you that cup of tea.”

“It can wait,” he said, hands still on his shoulders. The way he leaned over the Doctor made something deep down in Martha’s stomach begin to squirm, but he sounded casual as he added: “Until later, anyway. You just stay sat where you are.”

A hand rose again, this time to rub at his eyes. “Thanks, Harry. I just…yeah. Headaches aren’t usually my thing.”

“I know a bit about headaches.” Harry, already very close, moved closer still; as Martha watched, he dropped to one knee. The Doctor frowned even as Harry raised his right hand. The fingers hovered above his temple, and stopped just shy of touching his skin – yet there was nothing uncertain about their stance as Harry looked straight into the Doctor’s eyes.

“Are you feeling feverish?” he asked, so quietly Martha almost could not hear it.

“No.” The Doctor stared up at him, and even from her dim viewpoint Martha saw an odd wonder in there that made her stomach somersault. The Doctor knew who Harold Saxon was, didn’t he? Yet at that moment it was as if he was staring at a stranger. “Just…a bit of a headache.”

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” He leaned closer, words a near-whisper. “The man who makes people better.”

The Doctor jerked back. “What did you say?”

“Aren’t you, though?” Harry tilted his head again. “Can’t you fix yourself, Doctor?”

“I’m not that kind of doctor,” he whispered, and Harry smiled.

“Then what kind of doctor _are_ you?”

“Harry…”

“I was never one to listen to doctors, myself.”  Saxon leaned down. Both his hands were upon the Doctor’s face now, thumbs high upon his temples while the fingers cradled lower. Though they had been close before, now there was nothing between them but scant inches. Saxon had climbed to his feet again, the Doctor’s eyes fixed upon him alone as he remained seated. The smile grew wider as Saxon drew closer, and the Martha’s breath caught even as the Doctor’s eyes slipped closed.

The TARDIS whumphed, and Martha’s held breath exploded out of her; the two men jerked apart, Saxon almost stumbling back against the central console. The Doctor was already on his feet, fingers running crazily across the controls like the TARDIS was simply a temperamental cat that just needed a good petting.

“Hey, old girl, what’s that all in aid of, eh?” he said, and the brainy specs were back in full force as he fawned over her input. Martha could see his colour was high, however, and the stillness of the man watching the erratic motion of the Doctor made them appear nothing more than two halves of the same whole. To a person who had just wandered in, it might have seemed the Doctor was ignoring Saxon – to Martha, one who had been watching right from the beginning, it looked like the Doctor was only wishing very hard that he could.

“I’ll let you see to her, shall I?” Saxon said finally, voice deceptively light. “I know when to leave a man and his machine to have a bit of quality time together.”

The Doctor turned so sharply he nearly tangled his own feet together, his expression very much that of a deer in headlights. “Um…yeah. Ta, Harry. Guess I’ll…see you in the morning, then?”

One eyebrow quirked high in invitation. “Bright and early, with a fresh cup of tea?”

He blinked rapidly. “Yeah…yeah, I think I could just about manage that.”

Martha all but fled the scene – she didn’t stop until she’d turned at least five corners, and only then did she lean against one wall and let herself slide to the floor. Idiotically, the first thought that popped in there was: _All that, and not one mention of Rose!_ For all she knew it was stupid, stupid and childish, she really did wonder what these other people had that she did not.

As she moved quietly back to her room, to her bed, she recalled she’d thought not all that long ago that they had needed another person in here. She’d actually believed it might even things up a little…make the Doctor realise how good she was in her own right. Though perhaps that had backfired, just a bit.

Pulling the blankets high under her chin in a motion she hadn’t used since she was at least seven and convinced of the green slime-elf living in her closet, Martha closed her eyes tight. Even as she attempted to school herself to sleep with the conviction things would be better in the morning, she couldn’t shake the feeling of impending exam failure. And the tighter she closed her eyes, the harder it was to erase the happiness she’d seen on the Doctor’s face as Harold Saxon had leaned closer to give him what she hoped like hell was not the kiss it had looked like.

**Author's Note:**

> I really didn’t mean to write this. I haven’t written fanfic in years, and I always figured I was far too much of a newbie to a very old school show to ever attempt it. Yet, despite the incredible number of amazing writers in this fandom and the fact I’ve only been watching this show since that night in Edinburgh when I had nothing better to do except watch BBC1 until it stopped raining (I eventually realised that it was Scotland and I was pretty much out of luck on that front), it basically wrote itself.
> 
> I don’t know if there’s more to it. Perhaps there is. I’ll let it speak for itself in the meantime. Here I have, from Martha’s point-of-view, what my brain tells me might have happened if a certain someone got impatient while waiting for the right kind of Doctor to turn up on his doorstep.
> 
> I hope that, even from someone as new to this wacky little club as me, that it’s worth the read. ^___^ Even so, it’s only mild slash. I apologise for that much, at least.


End file.
